Fast prediction of personalized abdominal organ doses from CT examinations by radiomics feature-based machine learning models

Abstract

The X-rays emitted during CT scans can increase solid cancer risks by damaging DNA, with the risk tied to patient-specific organ doses. This study aims to establish a new method to predict patient specific abdominal organ doses from CT examinations using minimized computational resources at a fast speed. The CT data of 247 abdominal patients were selected and exported to the auto-segmentation software named DeepViewer to generate abdominal regions of interest (ROIs). Radiomics feature were extracted based on the selected CT data and ROIs. Reference organ doses were obtained by GPU-based Monte Carlo simulations. The support vector regression (SVR) model was trained based on the radiomics features and reference organ doses to predict abdominal organ doses from CT examinations. The prediction performance of the SVR model was tested and verified by changing the abdominal patients of the train and test sets randomly. For the abdominal organs, the maximal difference between the reference and the predicted dose was less than 1 mGy. For the body and bowel, the organ doses were predicted with a percentage error of less than 5.2%, and the coefficient of determination (R2) reached up to 0.9. For the left kidney, right kidney, liver, and spinal cord, the mean absolute percentage error ranged from 5.1 to 8.9%, and the R2 values were more than 0.74. The SVR model could be trained to achieve accurate prediction of personalized abdominal organ doses in less than one second using a single CPU core.